Transfers came and I stayed in the same area, my new companion is Elder Xu. He’s really cool. We get along really well and we push each other to work our hardest. I love it! We’ve been seeing a lot of success from working our hardest too.
This is kinda what’s been happening this last week. We started this Transfer with nobody but now we have a couple people in our teaching pool. We have Lorenzo who stopped meeting with us last transfer. I don’t remember if I told you guys his story but basically his cousin referred us to him and said that he was really looking for a change in his life and that he was interested in the church. We got through all the lessons with him and there was one final thing stopping him from getting baptized and he decided that it was too hard for him to do it and it was easier to stop meeting with us instead. It was really sad to see because I could see that he wanted change in his life and it was right there, right in front of him but he was kinda passing it by... I do understand that what he had to do was tough for him but I knew it was a lot better for him to face his problem. We haven't had good contact with him for about a month because he wouldn’t meet with us. This week Elder Xu and I called him and invited him to church and through the phone call you could tell he wasn’t really up for it. We told him we would call on Saturday to check again and when we did call on Saturday he wanted to come back and he asked for a ride. He came to church this Sunday. He wants to come again next week. We’ll see what happens next week but I was so happy to see him at church on Sunday.
Another person we found this week was Shannon. She’s pretty cool too. We found her in our Area Book and saw that she was living with some members so we gave her a call and she invited us over. When we were there she really opened up to us and told us about her past. She split with her husband and is now by herself with two kids while her husband has the other two kids. She not a member but they went to church pretty frequently when they were together but after they split it was hard for her to come alone. Aside from that she is so ready for change too! There are a couple challenges she has to overcome but she wants to over come them .She wants God in her life and she’s done living her past life. She asked us to come again, she asked us to leave a chapter for her to read in the Book of Mormon.
Veronica is kinda sad story though, but I think I learned an important lesson from it. She is someone we stopped and talked to on her front porch. We introduced the Restoration to her and set up another time to come and see her. The next time we saw her we taught her the whole Restoration and she understood it, it made sense to her. We gave her a Book of Mormon and told her that it was evidence that the Restoration had happened and she could know by reading and praying about it. She told us she would read it and then we asked her if she could say the closing prayer. She did and in her prayer she opened up and said how she had been going through some trials and she had asked God for some help and thanked him for sending me and Elder Xu. I know everything sounds awesome so far but the next time we saw her she barley opened the door and handed the Book of Mormon back to us and said she wasn’t interested anymore. We asked why and she gave us fake excuse and we left. My companion felt like we needed to go back and try again, to get the real reason why she suddenly wanted nothing to do with the Book of Mormon anymore. I didn’t really want to go back. I guess I felt like we had tried everything and she was just another person who wasn’t interested or ready. Well we did end up going back, and we talked with Veronica. We talked things out with her and she didn’t change her mind about it. She never told us her real reason to why she wasn’t interested anymore. After we left though I felt a lot better about the whole situation. Even though it didn’t end up the way I would have wanted it to go I still felt good about it. I think that has to do with that I tried my hardest. And the take away from this is that God doesn’t expect us to be perfect in all that we do but he wants us to do our best.
Elder Madsen 🐡
